Beagle Newsletter - 3 April 2006 Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter. If you're new to the project you can read up about it on our website: http://www.beagle-project.org
Hacking ---- Beagle Search Interface - As of the 0.2.0 release, Beagle sports a new search interface that was previously codenamed "Holmes". You may remember this project was started during an interface hackfest initiated by Lukas Lipka. The new interface removes the Mozilla Runtime dependency and utilizes native GTK+ widgets. In subsequent releases, Dan Winship and other community members have provided many bug fixes to the new interface. Memory Consumption - It is no secret that in the past Beagle has, on occasion, consumed far to much system memory when run for a long period of time. As this was certainly a large annoyance and deterred people from using Beagle, it has received a lot of attention as of late. Joe Shaw, utilizing the mono memory profiling tool Heap-Buddy, was able to track down several key issues in Beagle and Mono that have been taken care of as of the 0.2.3 release. Other improvements in this area have occured recently in CVS. Read all about it on Joe's Blog: http://joeshaw.org/2006/03/17/386 Video Filter - Many projects, relating to the Linux Desktop, have been focusing on video playback as a key feature for upcoming releases and Beagle is no different. A new filter, written by Alexander Macdonald, has been added to Beagle to help index all of those Internet videos, home movies and film trailers that are sitting on your hard drive. The new filter utilizes the power of MPlayer to extract the metadata and add it to Beagle's index. Alexander has also created new filters for GIF and XSLT files, which currently reside in CVS. External Filter - Writing filters for Beagle just got a whole lot easier. As of the 0.2.3 release, Beagle includes a special "external" filter that allows for metadata collection by other applications. If a certain application already has a good way of extracting the metadata, instead of writing a whole C# filter for it, that application can be utilized by simply placing some xml information in the systems external-filters.xml file. More info about this type of filtering can be found in the documented external-filters.xml file. Stability - Along side the much needed work on memory consumption there has been an overall focus on the stability of the Beagle daemon. Bugzilla has be as active as ever as bugs are being squashed as quick as they come in. Great job everyone in the community for reporting and fixing Beagle related bugs. Project ---- GNOME 2.14 - With the release of GNOME 2.14, three new additions to the desktop environment have come with the ability to search your Beagle index. First, Nautilus now allows users to create new searches within the file browser and save searches based on that query. If enabled, Nautilus will use Beagle for this searching. Second, a new panel applet has been included for quick searching. The panel applet, Deskbar, allows you to query Google, Yahoo! and a number of other websites in real time. If the Beagle plug-in is enabled, your files can be quickly searched using this handy tool. Finally, Yelp, the GNOME help tool can utilize Beagle for quick searching of the systems help documentation. Dashboard - There has, recently, been a revived interest in getting the Dashboard project running again. Dashboard, the predecessor to Beagle, was put on hold while a strong indexing agent, Beagle, was created. While the majority of the patches so far have been for fixing various compiling issues, there is a renewed interest in restoring this project with a well designed system to utilize Beagle's indexing prowess. As always if you have any input to how the next Beagle Newsletter should be distributed or what should go in it, please email Joe Gasiorek at [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Dashboard-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers
